Dr. Bonnie O’Neill will present “Womanhood, North and South: Lydia Maria Child’s Southern Correspondence following Harper’s Ferry” in September 28, 2026 at the downtown branch of the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library System.​​

Dr. Bonnie Carr O’Neill teaches early American literature and nineteenth-century American literature. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century American literature and culture, with special emphasis on the interrelations of literature and public life. Her book Literary Celebrity and Public Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Georgia, 2017) explores the personalization of public life that accompanied an expanding celebrity culture and its effects on authorship and civic discourse. Celebrity culture, she argues, intensifies already-fraught questions of national belonging and democratic participation even as, for some, it provides means of redefining personhood and cultural identity. Currently, Dr. O’Neill is working on a project on Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, the popular nineteenth-century minister, lecturer, and activist.​

This program is sponsored by a Mississippi Humanities Council America250 Grant.

For more information, call the CLPLS at 662-329-5300.